Prepare Her

"The girl has to go," Rachel tells the school. "Doctor's orders." This last bit is not a lie, although it feels like one, maybe because Rachel has never said "Doctor's orders" in her life. There is also something questionable—rebellious even—about the idea of keeping her daughter home when she is not contagious.

"Poor thing," says the school's director. "We'll be thinking of her. We'll be sending her positive vibes."

"Yes. I will let her know," Rachel says, and, as she hangs up the phone, she decides that she will indeed tell her daughter this. She has tried every method that she can think of—prunes, warm baths, hot drinks, promises of chocolate chips and sodas. There have been scare tactics, which Rachel regrets—threats of having to go to the hospital, of complicated, invasive measures. She might as well let her daughter know that her whole preschool is rooting for her. Bianca will not be embarrassed by this, Rachel thinks, or it might just be that Rachel has forgotten that shame is an opportunist, its means subtle and unfair. Rachel has forgotten that when she was Bianca's age, she watched her mother drop an egg on the kitchen floor. It landed with a slap of yellow, leaving a thin, snot-like thread across the toe of her shoe. This had filled her with humiliation, as if the thing had come from her own body, like some kind of unsightly discharge that was beyond her control. She began to cry and then to wail, and her mother did not know what to do with her.

"I don't know what to do with you," she said. Rachel's sorrow was unrecognizable, alien, dysfunctional. It had no place in her mother's heart.

Bianca is on the couch nibbling a piece of celery. The television is showing some kind of nature program. A volcano erupting. Veins of bright orange lava against a matte-black earth.

"I would just walk around the lava," Bianca says haughtily. The celery hangs from her mouth. She has not actually ingested any of it, but has only bitten the tip into a wet, stringy mess.

They have been to the doctor, who has suggested things like making "poop muffins," with bran and psyllium husk—simple, wholesome measures that Rachel is certain they are now beyond. Bianca has been refusing the toilet for five days. The pain comes in sharp, urgent waves and still she refuses, clenching her fists, dancing on her toes, anything to keep herself from going. This has become a psychological struggle, Rachel realizes. The solution is somewhere in her daughter's head, which is already, at four years old, filled with strange, fiercely sophisticated ideas. On the television, a scientist in a fire-resistant suit pokes a stick into one of the lava flows and pulls it up, slowly, as if he is stretching taffy. It does look harmless. It all looks so slow and harmless.

________

Rachel has been living with her mother now for six months, ever since she and her husband separated. Rachel's mother is hurt and perplexed by the separation. It was entirely Rachel's fault. It was not toxic and voluminous like her own divorce. There is nothing impressive and darkly human and novelistic about the way her daughter's relationship has deteriorated. It simply ended, without mystery or confusion. A waste. An unforgivable waste, she thinks. Rachel herself is not pleased with the way things have turned out. For one, she wishes that her mother's house were not so far away from town. She feels helpless out here, buried in snow, beneath the creaking trees, the steep, forbidding face of the mountain. She keeps forgetting to buy things at the grocery store, ingredients that slip her mind during the thirty-minute drive. When she arrives back and remembers that they are still out of peanut butter, or baby carrots, or dish sponges, she feels a sort of desperation, like she is starving. She opens bags of potato chips, thrusting her arm noisily inside while setting groceries on the shelf...